It’s been a day on reddit. Thousands of communities have temporarily closed shop to protest the company’s changes to the API, which affect many third-party apps. On top of that, the platform experienced “major outages” across its desktop and mobile websites and mobile apps.
“We are aware of issues loading content and are working to resolve the issues as soon as possible,” read a message. Reddit status page until 10:58AM ET. By 11:30 am, the site was loaded again. An update posted at 11:47AM said, “We are seeing improvements across the site and expect the issue to be resolved for most users. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.”
“The transition of a significant number of subreddits to private caused some expected stability issues, and we are working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Reddit told Engadget in a statement. At 1:26 p.m., the company said the strike had been resolved, avoiding the protest and returning to normalcy.
A bot Part of the protests involved monitoring all subreddits that went private. As you might expect, when Reddit went down there was no bot commission, but It works again.
Reddit said in April it would begin charging for access to its API, which third-party developers have used in thousands of apps connected to the platform, such as moderation tools. While the primary target of the API changes may have been companies ditching Reddit for content to train language learning models for generative AI systems, the move is a significant blow to third-party client developers who many Redditors prefer to the company’s own. Website or Applications.
As a result of the API changes, one of the most important third-party clients, Apollo, is shutting down at the end of this month. Christian Selig, the developer of the program, said that Apollo would have to pay $20 million a year to keep it running. RIF, another widely used third-party Reddit app, will also shut down on June 30.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman supported the API changes in an AMA before subreddits protested privately. He said the new policy is part of an effort to make Reddit profitable. “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, it can no longer subsidize commercial enterprises that require large amounts of data usage,” he wrote. “Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun and Sync will not see this pricing work for their businesses and will shut down before the pricing takes effect.”
UPDATE 1:28PM ET 6/12: He mentioned that the power outage has been resolved.
